What's up

Today is the last day of Lari Pittman's NUEVOS CAPRICHOS series (left) at 530 w 21 St Gladstone, which, like his past shows (I, II) is well worth checking out if you haven't - these augment the Goya theme with cel vinyl calligraphy of Emily Dickenson's pain poems, by someone who suffered near fatal gunshot wounds a while back.  They also have Marisa Merz up for another week at 130 e 64.  

Update: Forgot to mention the Dzama and Pettibon show at Zwirner another week, featuring the likenesses of James Joyce, David Bowie and Dzama's Flower of Evil trailer. Also, Lelong at 528 w 26 has two large Ana Mendieta projections and other works of hers another month and a half.

Sundaram Tagore's group show at 547 West 27 has five Sohan Qadris spread around for another two weeks, with Mickalene Thomas' Haitian and Diana Ross-themed photo portraits upstairs at Aperture.  Tagore's Steve McCurry show is up for two more weeks in Singapore, but New Yorkers can check out his photos of India at the Rubin til April 4, ending a day after Philly's photography of India show.

Valentine's Day brings Marcel Broodthaers at MoMA to go with his Écriture show at Michael Werner 4 e77.  Werner's gifts to the Phillips are up another two months, with two politically symbolic Immendorfs.  Also in DC the Hirshhorn's Surrealism and Sculpture show ends Sunday, Louise Bourgeois (below) has a room at the NGA, and there's quite a long line in front of the Renwick for their new installations. Darren Waterston's state-approved, art historical referencing vandalism of Whistler's decor led to a morning exchange..
Guard: Did you do this?
Ian: ..hmm..
G: You'll have to come with me.
I: (2nd guard enters) I can take you both. (leaving) Have you used that line before?
G: It works on smaller guys.

onto NH..

May be dusting off WKMA a little on 2016 US Presidential and other preoccupations..

Recent musical deaths

I've been listening to Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros, the Cuban trumpeter who played for Arsenio Rodriguez, Conjunto Chappottín, Benny Moré, etc. and just passed away at the age of 88, for a couple of years now after someone here finally told me to.. "La Brocha" is currently my favorite with him as a band leader..



Posts on Boulez here and here.. hopefully more to come including a longwinded draft I wrote after an irritating review of another composer's concert a while back and something else.. + Paul Bley if you haven't heard.

Update: + Mr Bowie 





my favorite Bowie song

What's up for five more days

The 50th anniversary restoration of Pierrot le Fou (I, II) is onscreen in NYC, which involved the lack of a negative or an orginal sound track among other daunting problems.  During shooting in 1966 the film's finances hadn't been secured ahead of time and Raoul Coutard insisted on utilizing the new technology of widescreen Techniscope color, after the last three features (Band of Outsiders, A Married Woman and Alphaville) were b/w, which involved more elaborate lighting setups, stressing Godard and the crew, but for now you can see projected Coutard's framing of the Riviera to 'Elle est retrouvée./ Quoi? - L'Éternité./ C'est la mer allée/ Avec le soleil.' Godard's sparing use of its source novel played up whatever natural psycho-social resemblance it had to Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, prompting its protagonist to tell a cocktail party given over sit-comedically to statements of consumerism that his senses weren't integrated, to be told by the guest he talks too much, to the various direct and indirect references thereafter.

Adapting dozens of literary sources at once, not sure why or which one to settle on, would plant the seeds of his recent style, and Godard reflected that Pierrot le Fou, arising out of his despair and confusion, was 'his first film,' coming after the genre structures of Alphaville (still my favorite) and Band of Outsiders (Americanized as Pulp Fiction) .  My favorite Welles film was The Lady from Shanghai, a bitter genre film of romantic betrayal starring his recent ex Rita Hayworth based very loosely on its novel, and though Anna Karina wasn't his first choice immediately after she left him for a mediocre director, Godard is even less restrained in abandoning genre to vent this emotions through the image of his ex.   Welles' Chimes at Midnight is also arriving in restored form Jan. 1 after its distribution rights have been blocked for years, and I've only seen bootleg versions and old vhs rental copies of it.

What's up for two more days and an hour or two

I posted hastily the other day and forgot the Joan Mitchell show, for which there's a big sign across the street from Marian Goodman while you're on your way to Matta and DAG, and the Frank O'Hara friend theme can be extended with Jane Freilicher and Joe Brainard around the corner. After her therapist tells her not to spend another summer in the Hamptons but to go to Paris, she becomes romantically involved with Riopelle and shows in several US museums  the following winter, 1959-60. They fly back to the US/Canada repeatedly and I presume Harbor December (left) is from one of their sailing outings in Long Island.  Her treatment of water, air, and boats reminds me of Monet (they lived in Giverny), and this show features her 1959 oil Goulphur I, of the lighthouse of the island of Belle-Île which Monet frequently painted in the 1870s and 80s.  Rodin described the Breton coast as "a Monet" and the Grand Vallée series of the mid-1980s  was inspired by "a friend, who recounts to her that a young cousin, on his deathbed, said he dreamed of returning to the Grand Vallée in Brittany, where the two had spent their childhood."  It has seemed to me that in her late years she painted emotional distance, of which the gaze back into childhood is one.

What's up for five more days

Di Donna's Surrealist show and Helly Nahmad's offering of de Chirico next door seek to view these artists through the prism of the mainstream art historical traditions of the landscape and neo-classicism, which the once-privileged de Chirico more or less willed.  de Chirico was commissioned to do a set by Diaghilev and found comfort in Cocteau's praise as Cocteau sought to get him in his camp against the Surrealists.  "Cocteau and Diaghilev, Max Jacob said, had tainted (Picasso) with their worldliness, which appealed to an inherent bourgeois streak in Picasso." (Richardson).. ..de Chirico (Memoirs): "I am very grateful to Jean Cocteau for the interest he has shown in me, but I must say I do not in fact approve the kind of praise he accords me and the interpretations he likes to put on my pictures.. even many people who are favorably disposed towards me do not understand a thing about my painting."  I am of the mind that the imagery of de Chirico's "Metaphysical" period was so neurotic and compulsive that even he didn't understand it, for which he sought correction in the ancient world of his childhood in Greece, attaching his fragile megalomania to a Classicist 'main line' of painting and theater as he was trying to win over French and Italian patrons, of which the latter were more resistant, all of which would later make for great shows at the Carlyle.

de Chirico, I due soli, 1969

Both de Chirico and Baselitz attempt to recover their essence - Baselitz says he tries to recover artists of the past from their Zeitgeist, but the later work of the two does so through art-historical reference.  Though Artaud is perhaps the strongest influence in Baselitz, Riopelle's "Artaud yes, Picasso no" declaims the battles with dead painters in castles that the elderly Baselitz shares with the elderly Picasso.  Here Baselitz does battle with Hokusai, pairing renditions of the 18thC master's self-portrait with previously used motifs.

980 Madison also has the winking Elie Nadelman - Joseph Cornell pastiches of H.C. Westermann at Venus, which is showing a tendency for the one-off jokes.  The Enrico Baj show is ending too.  At 130 64th St. the absence of gallery markings on Gladstone's address befit its current contents of Pierre Klossowski's large scale pencil drawings of various Sadean hijinx, a few doors from three floors of 1990s Thornton Dial.  Gladstone's Chelsea room is filled with Tinguelies (sp?) that you can activate with your foot.

Adolf Wölfli, Untitled, 1924

Also around here, but ending later, all Piri' Miri Muli' recommended and possibly resulting in more typing at this url is Peter Doig at Werner, Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic variations at Levy, and Julie Ault at Buchholz; Westside: Dubuffet's Art Brut collection at the Folk Museum (above); in Midtown: Matta at Pace, Torres-García at MoMA, and F.N. Souza's and Sunil Das' Indian working girls at DAG Modern - inspired but no match for Andrea del Sarto's Magdalene at the Frick.

Study of the Head of a Young Woman, ca. 1523

Continuing on the theme Alban Berg's Lulu is painted with ink on dictionary pages by Kentridge, joined by Freud, Berg, Mahler, and what I think is Adorno and Schoenberg at Marian Goodman's on the 3rd floor, where Szoke has Picasso and Munch prints up down the hall.  Up a floor is the more direct theatricality of Jeff Wall.

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What's up for two more days..

Piri' Miri Muli' readers who have not set out to DAG Modern for the Avanash Chandra retrospective after my Sept 20 notice are here advised that it closes this Wednesday evening.  Philip Rawson's observation in his 1971 Art of Tantra seems descriptive of Chandra's tantric phase in London:  "Tantra was never concerned with imitating an external world, and so its figures are to some degree stereotypes, puppets stimulating by their visual inadequacy a vigorous reinterpretation in the imagination of the mediator."  Like Chandra, Sohan Qadri who's, last I looked, featured in Sundaram Tagore's 82nd and Madison window, developed his Tantric painting in Europe.

Georg Feuerstein notes "Hindu Tantra.. was introduced to the Western World through the writings of Sir John Woodroffe.. in 1913" (Tantra 1999 xi) after recounting "..within the field of Hinduism, Tantra gradually fell into disrepute..  During the Victorian colonization of India, puritanism drove Tantric practitioners underground. Today, Tantra survives mainly in the conservative (samaya) molds of th the Shri-Vidya tradition of South India and the Buddhist tradition of Tibet, though both heritages also have their more radical practitioners who understandably prefer to stay out of the limelight".. Feuerstein's Yoga Tradition from the same year recounts "opposition in conventional Hindu and Buddhist circles.. Today Tantra is held in low esteem in India."

Rawson's earlier book strikes a similar note: "(Sir John Woodroffe, Calcutta Chief Justice and early translator of tantra) "was writing for a double audience: there were the Europeans deeply infected with Victorian prudery; and then there were the English-speaking Indians who were mostly under the influence of their caste-prejudices, ashamed and violently critical of elements in their own culture, and hence anxious to seem even more puritan than their Western rulers..  (Woodroffe) was standing out against a vocal alliance between an Indian caste élite and Western missionaries who were aiming to get Tantra outlawed.."

It is hard to reconstruct what prevailing attitudes predated British colonization, but Ajit Mookerjee and Madhu Khana's 1977 The Tantric Way suggests "Tantra.. grew out of the mainstream of Indian thought, yet in the course of time it received its nourishment from its own sources, which were not only radically different from the parent doctrine but often heretical and directly opposed to it. In this way tantra developed largely outside the establishment, and in the course of a dialectical process acquired its own outlook. The tantric approach is anti-ascetic, anti-speculative and entirely without conventional perfectionist clichés." (14)

Tantric art in exile inevitably finds itself in a reverse bind: the curiosity and sensationalism directed at its sensuality. "We could compare the state of Tantra in the West with that of Yoga, with which it is related. Like Tantra, the physical side of Yoga is emphasized.. even though those represent a small part of classical Yoga, whose main concern is meditation" (Frawley 21)  After making his way to tantrism by representing urban architecture, his earliest subject, as sex organs (above), Chandra's saṃsāra content focuses increasingly on the natural world during the years Pop Art was pre-eminant, moving from figures outside social contexts to the uninhabited landscape.

Rawson wrote about ancient Tantra painting "the objective colored surface was never meant to challenge comparison with any sensuously derived image of external reality. It was meant to stimulate radiant inner icons.. to produce a higher key or grade of objectivity than any transient reflection on the retina of the eye, a consistent world of the imagination against which visual phenomena seem grey and pale." (21)  If that reminds one of Duchamp's statement that his art "depended on something other than the retina," Octavio Paz wrote a year before Rawson's book ".. in both cases (Duchamp's Large Glass and 'the Tantric imagery of Bengal represent(ing) Kali') we are present at the representation of a circular operation that unveils the phenomenal reality of the world.. and simultaneously denies it all true reality." (65)  Chandra's paintings of grouped figures actually resemble Duchamp's 'Fauvist' phase of 1910-11 before he encountered Cubism and Picabia, inspired, by Duchamp's reportage "Obviously it's Matisse. Yes, it was him at the beginning."  Chandra features a Joy of Spring..

 

De Chirico, featured prominently at Helly Nahmad until Dec 23 and in the Surrealist Landscape show next door til Dec 18 (both unsurprisingly Piri' Miri Muli' recommended), called Matisse a "pseudo-painter" but Riopelle, at Acquavella til Dec 11, countered "the greatest is still Matisse, the only painter to have explored all possible techniques.. Luckily for the abstractionists, Matisse did no abstracts: he would have demolished everyone."

"On view through December 23^rd, Enrico Baj (64 East 77^th Street) offers the first American survey of Baj’s early paintings since his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1971."

The show in the gallery's three floors features the landscapes, generals, 'heroines,' and furniture phases of Baj's work of the years' preceding Breton's '63 essay:

'It is, indeed, the child within each one of us which is wounded the most atrociously these days. The fact that today it is not simply the child's life but the child's essential nature which is threatened is a monstrous scandal, and one that has affected Baj so deeply that he has felt obliged to launch a frontal attack..

'The stimulus which endows Baj's work with its extraordinary vitality owes is vigor to the fact that he is in control, in perfect harmony with the implicit contradictions, of a device set to sound an alarm and yet, at the same time, to spread joy..

'With regard to fire, he suggests that it is composed of "an infinity of tiny invisible bodies," some of which are round and some pyramidal, which explains why "the flame behaves differently, according to the type and sign of the angles made between the pyramid and the sphere".. As for sight, it "occurs when the outer coats of the eye, which have openings in them similar to those in glass, send out the fire-dust known as sight-rays and is stopped by some opaque matter which makes it rebound back to the home."..

'A quite recent period in Baj's work has singled out from this brutish regiment several incarnations of the 'general is full dress uniform'.. a mountain of importance about capable of giving birth to an intellectual mouse, nevertheless constitutes a menacing survival, particularly from the moment when he sets himself up as being an expert on 'psychological warfare' and in this capacity feeds his tiny rodent on Clausewitz and Mae Tse Tung.

'The general's female companion obviously presents a rather subtler moving target.. the attributes of femininity grant a partial immunity to this heroine of the knockabout farce.'

What's up another week

Magritte, Souvinir de voyage

Will Ryman's new sculpture Classroom, in which each student is made of a different natural resource, occupies the gallery in front of his The Situation Room, based on the photograph of Obama and his advisors watching the presumed raid on bin Laden's compound, made of crushed black coal (515 w27, til Oct 17).  The two rooms together offer a base and superstructure snapshot of the culture surrounding it, as defined by Marx in 1859: "The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life." Ryman "sketched out the scene" of The Situation Room "trying different colors before settling on black coal, both as a symbol of prized natural resources that have led to so many wars, and for its ability to redact the identity of the faces, as though they were censored material. From a cold-storage room, he pulled out studies where he had tested different grains of crushed coal, both glinting and dirtlike. The coal dusting over the figures evoked the lost city of Pompeii, where ancient life was buried in ash, frozen mid-motion." I'm predictably reminded of the "stone" phase of Magritte, figures petrified in his paintings beginning at the outbreak of WW2 and more so in the 50s, concurrent with Ernst's petrified Europe After the Rain series.

Theophanes the Greek, 15C

The Magritte influence is more clearly seen on the second floor of Metro Pictures (519 w24), where a few new Jim Shaw paintings* include a painting in which the stigmata of Jesus is apparently inflicted by several of what René called "the locomotive (charging out of the chimney).. This metamorphosis is called "La Durée poignardée (Time Transfixed)," (below) a metamorphosis compressing, in Shaw's case, the image of the crucifixion, more prominent in Western painting, and the transfiguration, emphasized in Eastern Orthodox iconography, into "a single glance."  Shaw visited Magritte's petrification motif in his "Red Rock," Magritte's "Castle on the Pyranees" with faces of pop culture painted on, as Noëllie Roussel paraphrases "Jim Shaw has often referred to Magritte as a symptom of a culture in which reproductions and their spin-offs so saturate our mental and imaginary worlds that art eventually becomes part of our way of seeing reality." This joins a few other new paintings and a wall of older, amusing parodies of folk art, a room which seems to be a well-guarded secret on the internet as the staff conjectures it will be up another two weeks. 

You may wonder, how does Jimmy get away with art history references?  I'll let Riopelle, who has what unsurprisingly I consider the best show in town** at Acquavella (18 e79, til Dec 11), take this: "Picasso? No, he's a mass of references. A reference himself. Artaud yes, Picasso no."

Jean Paul Riopelle, Les Picandeaux, 1967

Up another week at BravinLee (526 West 26th Street #211) is Elektra KB's "Accidental Pursuit of the Stateless," in which the Papess of the Theocratic Republic of Gaia expresses her solidarity with migrants though a video of three costumed T.R.O.G. natives attempting to assimilate into German culture, filmed during her residency in Berlin.  An embroidery of hers from her last show quite stood out at Spring/Break this year, and there is more here in that format as well as collages, a bed, and various other media.

* coinciding with his retrospective at the New Museum through Jan 10
** along with the larger CoBrA show, up til Oct 17.

N. Ramani 1934-2015

........